Professor Corrects Minority Student’s Paper, Hilarity Ensues
I hope that when you count your blessings this Thanksgiving, you will remember to include the fact that we live under the “historic,” post-racial regime of our esteemed Dear Reader, Barack Hussein Obama. Our ancestors would be stunned, and envious beyond belief, to see how we have been able to rise above the issue of race, and to bring to life Dr. Martin Luther King’s ambitious aspiration that we judge other people not by superficialities like skin color, but rather by the content of their character.
No, not really!
Surprisingly, despite the election of our first black president, somehow the chorus of lefty whiners who bleated on about Amerika’s ubiquitous racism and unfairness for decades before his election has gotten louder and more strident. Even worse, they have spawned a new generation of would-be victims, with an even larger sense of entitlement than their clueless parents.
That’s how we reach the point where a ridiculous episode involving a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles can inspire a “sit in” by minority students, enraged over his racism, and “microaggression.” In this case, the racism included — I hope that you are sitting down — it pains me to have to tell you about this sorry situation — the professor actually — please forgive me — corrected minority students grammar and punctuation in their assignments! From Inside Higher Ed:
“What we’re speaking to is part of a larger, institutionalized culture on campus,” said Kenjus Waston, a black Ph.D. candidate in the division and an organizing member of UCLA Call 2 Action: Graduate Students of Color. The group staged a sit-in, or what it called a “teach-in,” during a second-level dissertation preparation course in the division this month. Watson said members hoped to address racially motivated “microagressions” – seemingly innocuous but ultimately hurtful comments or actions – that have marked their time at UCLA.
About 25 students participated in the sit-in, in the classroom of Val Rust, professor emeritus of education. Watson – a student in that class – said Rust’s course was one of many in which students of “color and consciousness” have experienced discrimination. Of about 10 students in the class, 5 participated in the sit-in. Participants read a letter listing their complaints and a series of demands for reform. Regular coursework was suspended for about an hour because of the sit-in.
“A hostile campus climate has been the norm for Students of Color in this class throughout the quarter as our epistemological and methodological commitments have been repeatedly questioned by our classmates and our instructor,” the group’s letter reads. The statement accuses “the professor” (it does not identify Rust by name) of correcting “perceived grammatical choices that in actuality reflect ideologies” and “repeatedly questioning the value of our work on social identity and the related dynamics of oppression, power and privilege.” The “barrage of questions by white colleagues and the grammar ‘lessons’ by the professor have contributed to a hostile class climate,” it continues.
In fairness to Kenjus, seeing a completely unqualified, thin-skinned, narcissistic con man surf a wave of white guilt into the U.S. Senate, and then the Oval Office, who can blame him for trying to get in on this race hustling action?
Just when you thought you couldn’t milk any more laughs out of this unintentional comedy, you discover the Ron Popeil-like “wait there’s more!” The “racist” professor realizes that perhaps he is at fault because he didn’t intervene in a dispute between two students trying to out-victim each other.
[T]wo weeks ago a Student of Color and a white female student got into a big discussion. She wants to use Standpoint Theory [a method of analysis coined by feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith, based on the idea that all knowledge is subjective and based on one’s position in society] in her dissertation, and the Student of Color told her she had no business claiming that she was a member of an oppressed group. She came back saying there are all kinds of oppression. I likely did not handle the situation well, because I chose not to stop the discussion between them, so it went on for quite a while, and the Students of Color apparently interpreted my silence to mean I wasn’t supporting them.
A professor at a major university actually allowing a discussion? What have we come to? Don’t you hate liberal-on-liberal crime?
Alas, clearly we don’t live in a post-racial America. Such a utopian vision is as silly and unattainable as all the rest of hopey-changey yip yap recited by Barack Obama to millions of willing saps. We live in a nation in peril, as a man openly hostile to our Constitution and our traditions attempts to carry out his promise to “transform” it. Its future hangs in the balance. Still, when we count our many blessings this week, we should adopt the words of Chicago Cubs’ slugger Ernie Banks: “I want to thank God for making me an American.”
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Image: Courtesy of: http://secondary-writing-instruction.wikispaces.com/The+Writing+Process
